Eldest Sister's Tragedy (1)

In the wee hours of November 13 that same year, we got a frantic phone call from one of Yuni’s sisters. Eldest Sister and her husband had been in an accident in the mountains. Eldest Brother-in-law and his own elder brother and their two cousins were dead. Eldest Sister had been buried alive, but she was screaming so loud, bystanders heard her and dug her out. She had had surgery and was hanging on by a thread in a hospital in Hsinchu. She was going to be in the hospital for an extended stay, and we were needed to help out.

Yuni took the phone call, and afterwards he was numb. He was in between jobs, and he had been preparing to go down to California to do some stonework for the church publishing company there. He was just sitting in a stupor, but I managed to get him to call to make arrangements to postpone the job so that he could come with us to Taiwan and stay through the funeral. At least this trip we did not need to borrow money for the plane tickets.

We got our plane reservations and hauled out the suitcases. We were going to leave in less than thirty-six hours. I did laundry and got many things packed, when I noticed that Yuni had not moved for several hours. The children were quite worried. Finally, I persuaded him to take us to a park and to go for a walk. As we were driving to the park, Yuni began talking about Eldest Brother-in-law. Eldest Brother-in-law had been Pa’s first apprentice. He had come to live with the Lius when he was 15, after he had finished junior high. He was three years older than Yuni, and the two of them had shared a room. Yuni called him Elder Brother for the first five or six years of their relationship until Eldest Brother-in-law married Eldest Sister. Eldest Brother-in-law had given Yuni his Vespa scooter and his 35mm camera. He had been so good to him.

Yuni began telling me about Eldest Brother-in-law’s family. Eldest Brother-in-law was the second son. His family had decided that he would work from the time he was of high school age so that his brother could take lessons for the university entrance exam. He supported his elder brother through medical school. The brother who died with him was a doctor, who had lived in Taipei. Even though Eldest Brother-in-law had been sacrificed for his three brothers’ education, none of his brothers or his parents appreciated him. He was despised for being a laborer, even though he had had no choice in the matter. Yuni was very bitter about this because it meant that Elder Sister suffered in their household. Her mother-in-law was always finding fault with her. For many years after their marriage, Eldest Brother-in-law and Eldest Sister lived in the Liu household; their first two children were born while they were living with Pa and Ma. They lived with Ma and Pa so that Eldest Brother-in-law could save money to give to his family to meet his parents’ demands, but his parents refused to give him any support.

After telling his stories as we walked in a park with paths along a marsh and ducks and fall weather, Yuni seemed to be doing better. The girls could get through to him, and he began to play with them. We went out for dinner that night, and then we went home. I packed the freshly laundered clothes while Yuni and the girls watched TV. I also called my ESL students to take time off from teaching them. Everyone was quite understanding.

We left early in the morning of the second day after receiving the phone call. We arrived in Taiwan on November 17. Pa got us at the airport. Ma was at home waiting for us. She had been sitting in vigil by Eldest Sister’s bed 24 hours a day since the accident. Eldest Sister had awakened, and she was conscious, but very weak. Ma had wanted me to be called back so that I could cook for Pa while Ma was in the hospital. One of the sisters was at the house cooking, and she pulled Yuni aside. She told Yuni that Ma’s ulcers were bleeding again with her worry; she asked if I could stay in the hospital and let Ma stay home with our girls and Pa. They could come down every couple of days to visit. The four other sisters had been rotating time in the hospital with Ma and Eldest Sister, but they needed to work and take care of their families. At that moment, I was quite glad we were doing homeschool. We took an immediate holiday for as long as we needed, even though I had brought some of the books and had been planning to do school in Taiwan.

We had a shower and a meal, and I packed one of our carry-on bags with what I would need in the hospital. Eldest Sister was in a large ward room when we arrived. She had two or three other roommates. She slept a lot almost every day, as she was in extreme pain and on medication. The three youngest sisters were together in the hospital with her. Yuni, Pa, and Ma left me with my sisters-in-law while they took my girls out shopping to get me food and other supplies for the hospital. I needed my own pillow and blanket. Yuni also called some friends from church to let them know that I was there and to arrange for people to visit me from the church group in Hsinchu. It turned out that a friend of his from Taipei had been the overseer on the hospital renovation project. When he heard of the problem, he paid us a personal visit that very night. Eldest Sister was immediately moved to a private room with a cot for me (at no extra charge) because he brought the head of the hospital with him on his visit. Personal attention from the director of the hospital made an immediate difference in the care given to Eldest Sister. She had some residual problems despite the surgery. She had been complaining for over a day, but people were ignoring her. When she told the head of the hospital, the orthopedic surgeon was called, and arrangements were made for further treatments. It made a huge difference.

 Finally, Pa, Ma, Yuni, my children, and my other sisters-in-law headed back to Chungli. Eldest Sister-in-law and I settled in for her recuperation. I was there for seven weeks, and some very interesting things happened over that time period. (More about that later.) Suffice to say that Eldest Sister had been buried under rubble from a landslide in the mountains. Her stomach and other internal organs had ruptured, but since she was conscious in the emergency room until she went into the operating room, the surgeon decided to try sewing her up. He had done a painstaking job, and it seemed to be working. In addition to the injuries to internal organs, Eldest Sister’s pelvis had been broken in two or three places. The orthopedic surgeon had done his best to fix that, but he said we would not know until after six weeks when the bones had had time to grow back together. In the meantime, he used some traction and other physical therapy to keep Eldest Sister’s back in line and to strengthen her muscles. After everyone was gone and Eldest Sister had had her evening meds, I pulled out my cot, made it up with the sheets and blankets from home, and fell into an exhausted slumber. I had no problem with jet lag that trip.

An American Funeral

After we returned from Taiwan, we repaid the money we had borrowed for our plane tickets to the funeral. Then we got Yuni a general contractor’s license by using the leftover money to put up the bond required by the state. Yuni was able to take big jobs and buy at the wholesale rate, so his business began to pick up. Word went around the Chinese community, and he began to get jobs repairing driveways, retiling bathrooms, remodeling kitchens, and laying tile floors.

We had been home a month when my dad’s mother-in-law passed away. The kids had been close to G-gma, and so we went to the funeral. This was a no casket memorial service. The family chipped in to purchase a memorial bench in a large park in Bellevue. It was set on a grassy hillside among several clusters of trees. The memorial service was for family and close friends only. It was held at the bench. We sat on the bench and on folding chairs in a circle. We read some poems, sang some songs, and then we all shared memories of G-gma. Everyone, even the kids spoke if they wanted. In the end, we sat in silence with our memories. The kids got bored and began running and laughing and playing on the grass. They were wearing dresses with bright flowers on black backgrounds. The dresses didn’t show the grass stains, but their white tights were completely ruined. It was a nice, sunny day, and we all came away with happy memories.

Not long after the funeral, my dad and his wife went to Bali for a six-week trip. Yuni was working six days a week. The girls and I did our school lessons in the mornings, and we went on “field trips” several afternoons a week.

We had bought the girls a guinea pig after we returned from our trip to the East Coast. We all worked to care for her. “Snuggles” was a gentle animal, and they loved to play with her in the TV room. One day when we went to a petting farm for a field trip, the docent showed us a stray angora rabbit that had been left with them. The girls fell in love, and we came home from the trip with “Fluffy” the rabbit in a cardboard box. We quickly bought a cage and kept him just outside the back door. Fluffy and Snuggie became great friends. They would walk around the back yard on sunny days and play together in the TV room. When leaves got caught in Fluffy’s fur, Snuggie would come close and groom him.

Almost two weeks before my dad was scheduled to return home, I received a call from his wife. She was quite distraught and at their condo moving out. My dad’s second marriage was over. This news hit Yuni very hard. It came out that my dad had another woman, and he had asked his wife to leave. Because the marriage had been quite short-lived, his second wife was not going to get anything in the divorce settlement. That fact made it even harder for Yuni to accept.

He kept asking me how a college professor and administrator, a scholar, could be such a poor pattern to his progeny. I asked him what he meant. He said that wealthy, upper-class scholars were supposed to be more moral than average people. Education was supposed to make people moral. It was supposed to make them superior to the working classes. They were supposed to be the moral and ethical compass of their families. He asked again and again why my father would set that kind of pattern for his children and grandchildren. It seemed as though he felt betrayed.

I was at a loss to know what to say. I knew that Confucian morality requires teachers to be exemplary and that Chinese culture places emphasis on morality. Parents and teachers are supposed to be a moral pattern to their children and students. But my dad is an American; he doesn’t think like that. I tried to make Yuni see that he could not place his Chinese expectations on my dad, but he refused to accept that idea. He said that I was able to live by Chinese norms. I told him that I had studied the language and culture, so I knew what to expect. He would not accept that notion.

Then he would go into a tirade about the immorality of not supporting a cast-off wife. He would get very incoherent in these tirades, but I think part of it was related to what was happening with Elder Sister in Taiwan. The social nuances went far beyond what I had learned in Chinese classes, but eventually I understood that if a wife leaves a husband, she takes her gold and the clothes on her back. She is entitled to nothing more unless her natal family can show injury to her, and her father and brothers negotiate a separation settlement. Usually, however, the natal family is embarrassed and might even cut her off as well. If the husband casts off a wife, especially a wife who has borne him children or cared for his elderly parents, then he is expected to provide her a substantial sum. The ideal situation is that he would maintain both women in two separate households.  Yuni talked about a man in the village where he grew up who kept his wife with her children in a house at one end of the village street and his mistress with her children in a house at the other end. He was the hero of all the men and boys in town because both families were well-dressed, well-fed, and well-housed. We had a friend in Taipei whose father had run off with a mistress, abandoning his wife and children. The paternal grandparents had disowned their son and supported the faithful wife and her children with his share of the family property.

I tried to explain US divorce laws, but Yuni’s mind was mired in his traditions. He could not and would not accept the notion that a man and a woman could dissolve a marriage so easily, especially when the woman wanted to continue in the relationship. Men did not cast off old loves unless they were well-provided for. I think Yuni’s thinking came from the Chinese concept of marriage as a business and economic relationship rather than a love relationship. Because Dad’s second wife had spent much time and effort caring for my grandparents, Yuni felt that she deserved a handsome parting settlement, at the very least. When my father failed to provide that, Yuni lost respect for him and for all Americans. He had been disappointed by America in so many ways, and I guess this was the final straw. His emotions about Elder Sister’s situation bled into his reactions to the end of my dad’s marriage, too. The combination of all these factors made Yuni very unhappy for quite a long time.  

A Hakka Funeral, Part 3: The Seventh Seven

During the afternoon on the day of the funeral, all Grandma Chu’s gold and other belongings were divvied up among her children. Each daughter got a piece of gold jewelry and a funeral photograph as a remembrance. Daughters-in-law and granddaughters-in-law got larger pieces of jewelry based on how much time they had spent caring for Grandma during her final illness. The Maternal Uncles divided the rest of the gold and all the money among themselves. Because Yuni and I had taken Grandma Chu to the US and Taiwan, we got gold rings by which to remember her. In addition, the uncles came up to Yuni singly throughout the day, and each asked him in private how much our plane tickets had cost.

We went back home to Chungli that night, and we stayed in Taiwan for about three weeks. We visited the Paternal Uncles a few days after the funeral. We also took the kids to see their aunts and to play with cousins. All of Yuni’s sisters were married now, and most of them were either pregnant or had just given birth recently. There were tons of babies in the family now. When my sisters-in-law visited, I was kept quite busy cooking for everyone, although now that they were married and understood how tiring it is to cook for large crowds all day, every day, my sisters-in-law would squeeze into the kitchen and work together with me. We had some great times.

During our time at home, each of the maternal uncles came to visit to thank us for showing our filial piety at the funeral. They would invariably take Yuni into one of the bedrooms for an “important discussion” during which they would give him money to help defray our travel expenses. Pa also gave us money because he gained great face when his son returned from America with the entire family in tow. Eldest Sister contributed quite a bit as well. In the end, we came away with enough to cover the plane tickets and to set Yuni up with the bond for a general contractor’s license when we got back to the States. He kept pointing out to me how much better Chinese families were than American families because they gave money with no strings attached. He had wanted my aunt and father to lend him money to start up his contracting business, but they wanted a business plan and an IOU note in writing. Yuni was totally offended at the idea of family members needing to put financial matters into writing. I did not know what to say because I felt that his family was rewarding us for filial piety, so we had met their conditions for lending or giving money ahead of time. The face gained by the family was worth quite a bit, especially since distant relatives and neighbors had been laying bets that Pa and Ma had lost their eldest son to America. We silenced the ugly rumors and gave Pa and Ma ammunition to use back at people. In the end, I just let Yuni vent and agreed that his family was extremely generous to us.

Much of the time during family visits was spent catching up on the latest gossip. With all the cousins and siblings and their children, there were literally hundreds of people about whom we could gossip. One of the saddest pieces of news was the Eldest Sister’s husband had decided to set up a mistress in a separate household in order to try for a second son. The mistress was still pregnant, and Eldest Sister was worried that if the child was a boy, her husband would abandon her and her children. She said that he was already bringing home less money than usual and was always yelling at her when she presented him with bills. She had stopped working in order to devote herself to her son, and she insisted that her husband keep up the payments on her house and everything in it. Traditional Chinese culture allows men to keep several women, but the first wife is supposed to maintain her position, and her finances are not supposed to be affected by any of the mistresses. Of course, it doesn’t always work that way, but the women go passive-aggressive and make sure the man pays absolutely all the bills. If they earn pin money on the side, they hide it in case they get turned out in favor of the new love. Yuni was quite distressed to hear that his beloved Elder Sister was in such a miserable situation. The greatest indignation in the family was due to the loss of financial support to Elder Sister and her five children. Elder-Brother-in-Law had had numerous affairs prior to this, but he had never set up a mistress in her own household. That was a real slap in the face to Elder Sister and to the entire Liu family, especially since Pa had been Elder-Brother-in-Law’s master teacher in masonry. Without Pa’s help, Elder-Brother-in-Law would not have been able to earn such a good living.

A day or two before we left to return to the US, we all went back to Third Maternal Uncle’s home to participate in the 7^th Seven ceremony. Beginning the seventh day after Grandma Chu’s death, the family had made special sacrifices and hired a Daoist priest to perform rituals to help her soul pass on to the spirit world. These rituals were held weekly for seven weeks after the death and then sacrifices were to be made annually on Grandma Chu’s death day. The 7^th Seven was an extra-special ceremony, as it was the last event of the funeral proceedings. We all gathered around dusk (the propitious hour) in Third Maternal Uncle’s large front room. It had been completely emptied of furniture, and reed mats were spread on the floor. We all dressed in blacks and whites again, although the girls were finally allowed to wear their blue and white polka-dot dresses. The uncles, their wives, and children all knelt on the mats facing the door while the Daoist priest chanted and waved his incense and fan in front of them. He had bells that he rang at different points during his ritual, and he also had the curved wooden divining blocks that people throw in temples to cast their fortune. A boiled whole chicken, a bowl of rice, some wine, and a pile of fruit and candies were laid out on a table just inside the door. After about thirty minutes of prayer and ritual, during which the uncles wept loudly, the priest asked all of Grandma Chu’s children and grandchildren to call her to come eat. They shouted, the priest dropped the blocks, and the blocks both fell curved side up. That meant Grandma’s spirit had not come. The process was repeated about ten times. The uncles were quite desperate and began beating their breasts and crying even more loudly.

Ma and I were standing at the back with my children; I asked her why they were so upset. She said that the blocks had not been one up, one down yet for all of the seven ceremonies. That meant that Grandma Chu’s spirit had not returned to visit her children, and the uncles were afraid they had angered their mother with their lack of filial piety. I reminded Ma that Grandma Chu had converted to Christianity prior to her death. I had heard of cases where the Daoist rituals didn’t work in half Christian families. Finally, in the very end, the Daoist priest kicked the blocks as they were bouncing and got them to the one up, one down position. The Maternal Uncles were relieved, and the ceremony was over. We all went into the back kitchen/dining room area for a huge feast spread out on four big tables. While we were eating, Ma reminded her brothers about what the youngest grandson had seen, the vision of Grandma Chu being carried to heaven by two men in white just after her death. Ma told them that if Grandma Chu was in heaven with Jesus, the Daoist priest would not have been able to reach her, but they could be assured that she was happy. This made them all very relieved, and the poor boy was called to the Uncles’ table to repeat what he had seen and be quizzed about all the details. When we finally finished eating, Ma and Pa, Yuni and our children and I hurried back to Chungli so that we could get up early to pack and get things ready for our trip home.   

Summer in Shanghai

I apologize for my long absence from blogging. After the conference in Hawaii, I had to go into overdrive to finish the semester, get ready for surgery, and get a rough draft of my entire thesis done before I left for a month in Hong Kong and Shanghai (mostly in Shanghai). I did it!!

And I had the surgery. It was successful, and the surgeon found conclusive evidence that in the past, some procedure WAS done on me without my permission (see my post about giving birth to Peace). I will need further surgery to fix the aftermath of that, but at least the potentially dangerous beasties have been removed, and I am able to move forward to full health.

Because I got to Hong Kong just a little more than a week after my final health procedure, I did not do any extraneous sightseeing. I spent several days with my friends—the scribe, the heroine and Pommes—and did research in some archives at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as some interviews to bolster that research. Pommes and his servants are such gracious people; it was so nice to have a welcoming place to hang. The temperatures were high, as was the humidity, and it was nice to not feel compelled to rush around seeing sights. We did eat some awesome dim sum, but that is de rigueur in Hong Kong.

 On July 31, I arrived in Pudong Airport in Shanghai. As we landed, we were surrounded by a billowing yellow fog. Looking out the window, we could not see to the end of the runway, and it felt like we were in some eerie 1950’s sci-fi movie. Shanghai was hotter and more humid than Hong Kong, and it was much more polluted. I got to my hotel without mishap, and per the program coordinator’s instructions I requested to pay for my own single room as the anesthesia from my surgery and later procedures had exacerbated my allergies, and I needed a safe haven from scents (and pollution). The people at the desk were quite nice, especially when I explained that it was a medical situation, but the coordinator had neglected to mention that I might be making such a request, and they were booked solid, so at about 10 pm, I was called out, when my formerly assigned roommate arrived and tried to get into the room. Eventually, they worked it out, and I had my single room, but the American coordinator kept trying to tell me that I would be okay sharing a room. I had had a major allergy episode in Hong Kong, and the younger women all wore scents of one kind or another with the heat, so I stood my ground. Fortunately, all three of them had been in China doing research prior to the workshop, and they all had places to stay in Shanghai.

The people in the hotel were quite nice. The service was excellent, and I think they felt embarrassed that they had not known to be prepared for my request. They had our translation group and a group of students from Japan, who were studying Chinese. Plus they had group after group of “Red Education” tours. We were in a government-run hotel, and in China, Party cadres rotate through “Red Education” weeks on a regular basis. During that week, they go to a site with significance to the Party where they stay in a government hotel and attend classes on the latest Party updates in the morning. Then they go sightseeing in the afternoon. They ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the hotel every day, and their lunches and dinners were always banquets. The rest of us just sat at small tables around the peripheries of the dining room. It was harder to get a lunch plate there, than to order a full-fledged feast. In the three weeks of our stay there, I think we went through four full tour groups, and there was a fifth just starting when we left.

The translation workshop was wonderful. The Chinese-English group met Mondays and Thursdays. We sat at a formal seminar table complete with microphones (not turned on) and elegant name plates. Our professor was Ted Huters, professor emeritus from UCLA and editor of Renditions translation journal, which is one of the top journals of Chinese-English literary translations. He has decades of experience, and his comments were quite helpful. We students came from different disciplines, and so we each chose an article in our field, one that was related to our research, and we took turns presenting our translations to the group. Professor Huters and our classmates made comments and helped us get the best rendering of the difficult passages. It was thoroughly wonderful. There were some very interesting articles. The students from the English-Chinese class could sit in if they wished, and a few of them added their input to the discussions.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday were the English-Chinese classes. That section was taught by the Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at Fudan University. His name is Deng Zhenglai, and he is considered to be one of the top five most influential university professors in all of China. He has published about 20 books of his own and 20 more of his translations, plus numerous journal articles. He edits several of China’s top social sciences journals. He was, of course, a strict, traditional Chinese teacher. I felt like I was back in Taiwan with my favorite Chinese teacher. They were all working on one text, James P. Sterba’s “Liberalism and the Challenge of Communitarianism.” It was all about finding a “non-question-begging conception of the good” that accommodates both self-profiting and moral conceptions of the good. Doesn’t that just sound like so much fun to translate into Chinese? The discussions at times got quite heated, and I felt like I was back at the publishing company in Taiwan working on translations of the Bible. All good!! I really liked Professor Deng. I sat in on every minute of every English-Chinese session.

And while I was in China, I did some serious thinking as to whether or not I would continue this blog. I have overt posts about translation clients, who are indeed blacklisted in China. This fact was not lost on the Chinese; I was invited out to dinner twice, and my work with these people and my research on underground churches in China was examined. I suppose it did not help that since May, a certain house church in Beijing has been trying to obtain a facility in which to hold public meetings of approximately a thousand people, and after being repeatedly thwarted by the government, they have taken their large Sunday-morning gatherings to a park in Beijing. I had read about this church on a house-church news listserve. What I did not know until I came back to the US and made some inquiries, is that, about the time I went to China, a group of house-church pastors had banded together to write an open letter to the government calling on China to let the church have its facility AND one of my former translation clients here in the US has been using this incident to promote human rights in China. Due to my health situation, I have not been doing much translation lately because I needed to get my iron count up so I could have anesthesia and surgery, and after my health, school work was my next priority. I had lost contact with some of my “blacker” clients (in China’s eyes), but China didn’t know that. In any event, a very kind lady went over things with me at two different dinners, and then it seems that things checked out, and I was fine. And because of that, I decided that taking down the blog now would be like closing the barn door after the horse had run away. So I will continue posting. My research on Chinese culture for my thesis and some of my more recent experiences have given me a better perspective on earlier episodes in my life, and I find that if anything, I have MORE to say.

I did not do as much sightseeing in China as I would have wished. My first weekend in Shanghai, there was a hurricane. My second weekend, when the translation workshop took a trip to a river town with canals and pretty gardens, I had a major allergy attack and had to stay sedated in my hotel room to get my airways open again. But my last Saturday there, I was able to take the Big Bus tour of all the main points of interest in Shanghai. It starts at People’s Plaza and goes to the Bund, the old French Concession, the main business district, some of the old temples, and it winds up with an evening river cruise on the Huangpu River so you can see the lights in both the old and new Shanghai commercial zones. I liked the river cruise the best. The view from the World Finance Tower was quite nice. The smog was not too bad that day. Another lovely spot was the Yu Garden and Temple of the City God market area. It’s a tourist zone, but I found that by bargaining, I was getting stuff for three times less than the other tourists I met on the river cruise. The Jade Buddha Temple was also interesting in that the statues look more Indian than Chinese. (I did not have a camera... so no pictures.)

All in all, it was a wonderful trip. To me, actually, the highlight was that as a blogger about China, I was “taken to tea,” although as a foreign blogger, I also got to order lamb chops (the most expensive item on the menu). Some of my friends at home did not see things like that. Personally, I was surprised to have even gotten a visa. I have overt posts on my blog about smuggling Bibles into China in the 1980s. I have posted my translations of the work of active (and blacklisted) Chinese democracy advocates. And yet, while I was in China during a situation that the Chinese government sees as a matter of national security, I was treated with kindness and courtesy, and no restrictions were placed on me. I even asked if there would be a problem in the future, if I continued to visit friends in the US who are “blacklisted.” I was told that friendship is a good thing, and I should keep up my friendships. (I had my computer checked, just in case, but my techie didn’t find any bugs.) To be quite honest, in post-9/11 USA, I am not sure we would have treated a foreign person with comparable connections as well as I was treated in China. Had I been someone coming our way, I just might have wound up in Guantanamo or some other off-shore site for “enhanced interrogations.” And I think it’s a sorry state that OUR society has come to.  

Another View of Tiger Mothering

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Tiger Mothering
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I saw this last night, and I thought I would share it with you. What makes good mothering??

A Traditional Funeral--Hakka Style: Part Two, the Funeral Cortege

Early the next morning, we put on dark colored shorts, plain white shirts, and pure white tennis shoes. We grabbed a bite for breakfast and headed over to Third Maternal Uncle’s house. The tables in the tent had been taken down and stacked against the side of the house. A large altar had been erected at one end of the tent with Grandma Chu’s death portrait hanging at the top. Wooden benches were set up in rows towards the back of the tent, and in front of the altar was a large open space where the rites would be carried out.




Third Maternal Uncle’s Wife bustled us into the back of the house where we put on our funeral clothes. My girls were dressed in bright red robes with boxy hats. Eldest sister’s daughters were in bright red robes with pointy cloth hoods. Her son was dressed in white linen with a boxy hat, though, because as a boy, he had to follow the lineage lines. Ma and all her progeny were dressed in white linen. Men and boys had boxy hats, and women had long hoods. One side of the hood was longer and tied on under the linen belt that tied the robe closed around our waists. The short side of the hood could be drawn over the face when we were wailing or crying. As a daughter, Ma’s belt was made of hemp rope; all her children and grandchildren had white linen belts. Ma had a patch of burlap attached to her hood to show that she was a daughter-in-law or a daughter.



Everyone’s funeral clothes allowed experienced viewers know exactly what relationship the person wearing “filial piety” had with the deceased. The Maternal Uncles wore white linen under-robes with a burlap over-robe, and their belts were made of hemp twine. Their wives wore the white linen outfits like Ma’s. The Maternal Uncles’ hats were boxy except the hat of Eldest Maternal Uncle. His hat was something like a burlap mob cap with a rope crown tying it onto his head. In addition to his funeral outfit, he carried a wooden staff to show that he was the eldest son of the deceased. The eldest grandson, as heir of the family altars to the ancestors, wore the same outfit as Eldest Maternal Uncle without the wooden staff.



The Maternal Uncles’ sons wore white linen with burlap patches on their hats and hemp twine belts. Their daughters and daughters-in-law were dressed like we were. The maternal uncles’ sons’ children wore sky blue robes with red linen patches on their hats. Again the boys had boxy hats, and the girls had the pointy hoods. Children of daughters wore white linen in all generations.

Daughters-in-law and Daughters at a funeral

Sons-in-law and grandsons-in-law wore towels knotted around one shoulder like a sash. They acted as ushers. Because Eldest Maternal Aunt’s husband was in the hospital and unable to attend the funeral, Pa wore the same clothes as a son, except that his hat was boxy instead of mob-cap-style, and he played the role of eldest son-in-law. Chinese tradition says that sons-in-law are “half sons.” One son-in-law plays a representative role in the funeral; Pa also followed the coffin to the gravesite, but the other sons-in-law stayed at the house entertaining the guests.



When we were all dressed, the children and grandchildren of each of Grandma Chu’s children arrayed themselves in ranks with the elder who linked them to Grandma Chu. We lined up inside the house, to the side of the tent. As we were dressing, the musicians had been playing, and the invited guests had been coming in to fill up the benches. There were both a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest to conduct the rituals. The coffin was carried by the sons and grandsons in a sling out to the center area and placed in front of the altar on trestles. There was still quite a bit of open space in the center of the tent between the coffin and the audience where each rank of progeny would perform their ritual good-byes. As the token Christians, we were all handed wreaths to place before the coffin when our turn came.

A grandson in a mob-cap-style hat with a Taoist icon before the funeral altar and funeral musician from Taiwanese-Secret.com. Note the Taoist priests in the background. Note the white tennis shoes.

At the auspicious hour, the music softened a hair, and the Buddhist monk and Taoist priest began their rituals. Then Eldest Maternal Uncle and Eldest Maternal Male Cousin came out and performed the first ritual family sacrifice to Grandma Chu. It was all in Hakka, but Ma and my sisters-in-law told me that they were asking Grandma Chu’s spirit to pass on to the next realm where she could protect the family. They also told her where her grave would be and what arrangements had been made for her. Next Pa performed the rites on behalf of the sons-in-law. They were much shorter; he was introduced by the master of ceremonies, and came forward to burn incense and bow before the coffin. The Eldest Son and Grandson had actually kow-towed three times at the end of their ritual. Pa did not need to do that.



Eldest Maternal Uncle, Eldest Maternal Male Cousin, and Pa all stood to the street side of the coffin to oversee the rest of the rites. The master of ceremonies called Eldest Maternal Uncle’s Wife and children to come say their ritual good-byes. The first of our ranks-in-waiting filed into the middle area where they burned incenses, wept, and bowed to the coffin and Grandma Chu’s picture. Second Maternal Uncle had passed away in his forties, but his wife, children, and grandchildren came out next to say their good-byes. And so it went through the families of all six of Grandma Chu’s sons who had survived to adulthood. When they had finished their good-byes, they moved to the street side and back of the tent to stand respectfully.



Next, came the families of the daughters. Eldest Maternal Aunt led her children and grandchildren to say their good-byes. Then it was our turn. Yuni and I flanked Ma as her eldest son and daughter-in-law. My sisters-in-law led my girls so that I could support Ma as she walked. We laid our wreaths before the coffin and stood with bowed heads in silent prayer for a few minutes before Yuni prayed aloud to Jesus in Hakka. Then we moved back, and Third Maternal Aunt led her family forward. All five of the Grandma Chu’s daughters came forward with their children and grandchildren to say good-bye.



We stood around at the back of the tent while one of Third Maternal Uncle’s friends from the Lions Club gave a eulogy. Then a county official spoke because it was a “happy occasion” funeral. Finally, the guests filed forward to burn incense and pay their respects to the deceased by burning incense (joss sticks) before the coffin. The musicians kept up their cacophony and at the end the Buddhist monk and Taoist priest each said a concluding prayer. Then, we moved to the next stage of the funeral.


At the appointed hour, Grandma Chu’s sons, grandsons, and Pa with the help of the coffin maker’s factotums placed the coffin on a hand-cart bier, and we began the funeral cortege procession. The men of the family pushed the coffin up the street for about a quarter of a mile, while the women and children walked behind weeping loudly and holding their hoods over their faces.

Children and grandchildren at a funeral walking in the cortege

A quarter of a mile up the street from Third Maternal Uncle’s house there is a large highway that goes out to the remote areas where the graveyards are. There were two buses for family members and numerous flower cars. The coffin was put onto the largest flower car with Grandma Chu’s portrait on the top. Flower cars are trucks with flowered panel superstructures and flower wreaths on the grille. They are used for funerals. The musicians were in the first flower car leading the way. Then, came the flower car with the coffin. Next was the flower car with the sons, eldest grandson, and eldest son-in-law. Then there was an open truck with two chairs in it. The eldest great-grandson sat on one chair dressed in his blue outfit, and the eldest great-granddaughter sat on the other chair dressed in bright red. The eldest great-granddaughter was about five, but the great-grandson was only two or three. The great-granddaughter was charged with making sure that he did not fall off the chair onto the road. Then there was a flower car with grandsons, and finally there were the two buses with all the women and children, and the grandsons who did not fit into the flower car. Each of the flower cars had pink flowers in the grille wreath among the white and yellow chrysanthemums, and there were red and white striped lanterns hanging from the four corners of the truck with the coffin. Ma told me that the striped lanterns and the two youngest generations sitting side-by-side proclaimed to viewers in the know that this was a “fake five generations” with a nephew of the fifth generation. If it had been a niece, the lanterns would have been white and pink. If there had been a great-great-grandchild in the family, the lanterns would have been solid red.



The cortege processed slowly along the edge of the highway out to the gravesite. We were in the second bus, and by the time we got up to the grave, the coffin was already in the ground, and the sons and grandsons were filling in the dirt. Later, Pa told us that the coffin had almost fallen off the sling towards him, and he had guided it into the ground. He took this as a sign that Grandma Chu was acknowledging his attempt to say good-bye and his participation in the funeral rites. He was quite happy. Once the coffin was covered with earth, the family members came forward in twos and threes and burned incense. Daughters and their descendants did not participate in the incense burning, as they were not of the Chu clan. After all the incense had been burned, we took off our “filial piety” robes on the dirt road next to the grave. The robes were only basted together, and we had to pull out all the threads and be sure the clothes were merely pieces of cloth before we left the grave area. If we went back in “filial piety” robes to the bus, we were told it would attract Grandma Chu’s spirit, and she would not rest in peace. This would bring us all kinds of bad luck. The Maternal Uncles’ wives collected all the cloth and said they planned to make underwear for the family for many years to come. Pa said that underwear made from funeral robe linen was one of the most comfortable things to wear in the summer.



The flower cars went back to the funeral parlor, so we had to pile everyone into the already crowded buses. The buses whipped us quickly back to Third Maternal Uncle’s house where the last guests were just leaving after eating a huge feast. Before the members of the family could eat, the Maternal Uncles each took one of the funeral photos of Grandma Chu and placed it on the family altars. Several of the Maternal Uncles live in Toufen within blocks of each other, and they all ran home to install the photos before coming back for lunch. Once the photo was installed, three cups of wine and some food were placed before it. Then the uncle and his family burned incense and bowed before the picture in his own home.



Since we were progeny of a daughter, we just sat at the tables and ate hungrily. Third Maternal Uncle had a friend from the Lions Club who was a videographer. He made a tape of the funeral, and Yuni and I were given a betamax video tape. Betamax video players soon went the way of the dodo bird, and we were only able to watch the tape once. Many years later, when we tried to get it converted, we were told that the tape had molded, and the images were lost. We did not get any photos, either. The girls were so cute in their bright red “filial piety” robes. They looked like little stars in period TV dramas set in the Tang Dynasty.

Aloha from Waikiki

Just a quick post to say that I have been in Hawaii for the past five days. I leave in a minute, but I couldn't resist the title. I was attending the Association for Asian Studies National Conference where my professor and I presented the revised version of the paper that we had presented in Singapore. The presentation went well, and I learned a lot at the conference.

I have been staying at the Ilikai, which is the hotel featured in the opening credits of the original version of Hawaii 5-0. I am on the 25th floor just under the penthouse with a great view of the mountains. I didn't want to pay an extra $30 per night for views of the ocean that can be seen when I leave the hotel.

I was able to meet blogger buddy Cloudia Charters one evening just before sunset for a walk along the boardwalk of Waikiki (bad knees and white sands do not do well together, as I found out my first day here). Cloudia lives on a boat in the marina near my hotel, which was where the filmed the opening credits for Gilligan's Island. In cyberspace, her address is: http://comfortspiral.blogspot.com/. She always has amazing pictures and great inspirational quotes. Cloudia took a few pictures of me, since I have no camera. And here they are.

The top one is from the balcony of my hotel looking back to a rainbow in that dark cloud over the mountains. The bottom one is at the beach looking out towards Diamond Head.

So now it is time for me to power down the laptop, check out, and head for the airport to return to the grind of being a grad student. I have class tomorrow, and I have to do all the readings for it on the plane because I was not really in homework mode this past week... It was a great spring break!